Category Archives: Paul

April 21, 2011 · 3:04 pm

Maundy Thursday, 2011

I have never waited longer to share in the Holy Meal. It is April 21, 2011. The last time Maundy Thursday took place this late in the year was April 22, 1943, the latest it is possible for it and surrounding Holy Week events to ever take place. The next year I will wait this long for Maundy Thursday will be 2038 when I will be 83 years old.

We owe this movable observance to the Hebrew lunar calendar by which the date of Passover is determined.  Simply put, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring.  So Easter and its connected religious observances are constantly wandering around our calendar. The result is that people younger than 68, along with me,  have never waited this long for Maundy Thursday before.

The wait this year focuses my attention to another wait always a part of Holy Communion. In the words of institution found in First Corinthians chapter eleven Paul says, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.” The last three words, “until He comes,” make every Lord’s Supper an anticipation of an other event for which we wait.

Deep in the believer’s heart is a yearning for a more complete experience of the presence of God than it seems possible to know in the midst of this world. There is always a dark edging in on the light when we stand before the table of God. Inexplicable tragedy, the fragility of life, injustice unheeded, and many other troubles are over our shoulders, waiting on us to turn and leave the Presence behind. Today I will not be able to hear, “This is my body broken…” without thinking for the thousands of bodies mangled in the debris of Japan’s tsunami.

“Until I come,” is a promise that this will not always be so. As God was present in the incarnation of Jesus, as Christ is present in the church as we gather in communion, so will the presence of God banish all else in the eternal and complete  revelation of God’s redemption through the coming of Jesus Christ for which we wait.

We have had to patiently wait the coming of Maundy Thursday this year, the timing determined by the movements of heavenly bodies we do not, nor will not, control. And we will patiently wait, as people of promise, in faith, for the eternal moment whose timing we can not understand when we will be in God’s presence forever.

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Filed under Church, Corinthians, Holy Communion, Holy Week, Hope, Japan, Jesus, Maundy Thursday, Paul, The Future, Waiting

October 18, 2009 · 10:12 pm

The Resurrection of the Dead vs The Immortality of the Soul

On Wednesday evenings I am leading a Bible study of Paul’s Corinthian letters. Recently we have been in I Corinthians chapter 15 and have been discussing the resurrection of the dead, the subject of the entire chapter. It is tempting to pull a few hopeful verses from this chapter for use in funeral services and move on just taking resurrection as a given in the Christian faith. But the Corinthians’ struggle to understand the meaning of resurrection as something very different from the immortality of the soul is very much a problem for us today.

The idea of the immortality of the soul was a very familiar idea to the Corinthians. It came to them as a basic part of Greek understanding of the world which taught that the soul and the body were separate things. The soul was good and immortal while the body was temporary and inadequate. On death the the soul was freed from the weak and temporal body to continue it’s immortal journey in the realm of the spirits. Understood correctly, it was best to accept death as a welcomed deliverance of the soul from its mortal prison. The Corinthians equated the immortality of the soul with the Gospel’s promise of the resurrection of the dead. All this sounds quite familiar to us as western society is heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Greeks.

There were, and are, however, serious incompatibilities between the Gospel and Greek philosophy that are particularly stark when it comes to the difference between immortality and resurrection. In Christian understanding death is not a part of God’s plan but has been imposed into our experience as a result of sin. Death is an enemy to be defeated. God’s plan is to deliver us from the influence of sin and its ultimate expression, death. When Jesus died His soul was not freed from an unimportant body. Rather he was experiencing in an act of love and sacrifice all the terrible destruction that our sins have imposed upon God’s plan. The resurrection of Jesus inaugerated the power of God’s plan in defeating death.

Another area that needs to be informed by the concept of the resurrection of the dead is respect for the body. While an immortal soul is delivered from bodily imprisonment in Greek thinking, the Biblical revelation teaches us that we are wonderfully made and that every part of us is loved by God and should be loved by us. We are not a soul trapped in a worthless body. We are a treasured creation that God has made, “a little lower than the angels … crowned with glory.” God’s redemptive plan includes all that we are, body, mind, soul, emotions, everything. The resurrection of the dead teaches what while our physical bodies are temporal and will “return to dust,” what lies beyond is a perfected extension of what God has already started, the redemption of our whole selves including the embodiment of all that we are.

Paul taught the Corinthians that the resurrection of the dead was a divine plan that expresses important aspects of God’s loving redemption revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. I think we need to pay attention, too.

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Filed under Body and Soul, Corinthian Epistles, Death, God, Immortality, Jesus, Paul, Resurrection

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